Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Eight years of Understanding Society

This week marks the end of the eighth year of Understanding Society. This year passed the 1000 mark — the blog is now up to 1,029 posts, or well over one million words. The blog continues to be a very good venue for me for developing and sharing ideas about the foundations of the social sciences and the ways that we attempt to understand the social world. (Mark Carrigan captures a lot of the value that a blog can have for a scholar in his recent excellent book, Social Media for Academics. Thanks, Mark, for including Understanding Society in your thinking about academic uses of social media!)

Writing Understanding Society continues to stimulate me to read and think outside the confines of the specific tradition in which I work. The collage presented above represents just a few of the books I wouldn't have read in the past year if it weren't for the blog. It gives me a lot of pleasure to recall the new ideas learned from working through these books and capturing a few ideas for the blog. There is a lot of diversity of content across these many books, but there are surprising cross-connections as well. (If you want to see the post where one of these books is discussed, just search for the author in the search box above.)

There are some common themes among the hundred or so posts in the past twelve months --

a focus on causal mechanisms and powers;

attention to the theory of critical realism;

a continuing interest in China's recent history;

an interest in better understanding the dynamics of race in the US;

an interest in the mechanisms of social change at the micro-level;

an interest in the ways in which knowledge and values play causal roles in society.

I don't have an exact measure, but my impression is that the past year has witnessed a higher number of posts on topics in the philosophy of social science as such, with fewer on more contemporary topics.

I am very grateful to the many readers worldwide who find topics of interest in Understanding Society. Google Analytics reports 72,051 page views of the blog in the past month, and 718,000 page views for the past twelve months. Here is the global distribution of visitors from the month of October; it is evident that there is a fairly wide distribution of readership around the world.

About Me

I am a philosopher of social science with a strong interest in Asia. I have written books on social explanation, Marx, late imperial China, the philosophy of history, and the ethics of economic development. Topics having to do with racial justice in the United States have become increasingly important to me in recent years. All these topics involve the complexities of social life and social change. I have come to see that understanding social processes is in many ways more difficult than understanding the natural world. Take the traditional dichotomy between structure and agency as an example. It turns out that social actions and social structures are reciprocal and inseparable. As Marx believed, “people make their own histories, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.” So we cannot draw a sharp separation between social structure and social agency. I think philosophers need to interact seriously and extensively with working social researchers and theorists if they are to be able to help achieve a better understanding the social world.

Open source philosophy

Since 2007 this site addresses a series of topics in the philosophy of social science. What is involved in "understanding society"? The blog is an experiment in thinking, one idea at a time. Look at it as "open-source philosophy" -- a web-based, dynamic monograph on the philosophy of social science and some foundational issues about the nature of the social world.

Recent publications

Currently reading ...

Digital editions of Varieties of Social Explanation

Digital editions of Varieties of Social Explanation are now available on Kindle and iBooks for iPad. This edition contains the original text of the 1991 edition along with an extensive new introduction, "Philosophy and Social Knowledge."